Course description

PLEASE NOTE: This syllabus is under development. This course will be offered in Fall 2010, and I will probably be tweaking the syllabus right up to the last minute. Return to this page often for the latest.

This course will provide an overview of evaluation and assessment activities in libraries. Students will consider various library operations as evaluands, and the extent to which these operations are evaluable. Students will become familiar with existing tools for evaluating library operations, will design their own evaluation, and conduct their own evaluation research.

This course will be composed of the following Units:

Introduction to evaluation, broadly construed, and approaches to evaluation that are common in libraries. The guiding questions for this unit are as follows:

What is evaluation?

What constitutes a good evaluation?

What is the difference between evaluation and research?

What approaches to evaluation are used in evaluating libraries?

Overview of library operations and services, and how those are evaluated. Guiding questions:

What are the functions of a library? What activities and operations are engaged in by the library? What services are provided by the library?

What operations and services of the library are evaluable?

What data do the various operations and services of the library generate, that might be used in an evaluation? What data would be desirable to collect to evaluate a library function?

There is a catch-22 involved in this course: conducting an evaluation depends on the appropriate use of methodology, but you will most likely not yet have taken INLS 780: Research Methods. We will make heavy use of various methodologies in this course, especially for your assignments. But this is not a course on research methods. We will therefore address specific methods as appropriate for the work in this course. For a more systematic approach to methodology, take INLS 780.

Course objectives

By the end of the course, students will be able to:

Identify library functions and services that must be assessed.

Plan, design, and implement an assessment program in a library.

Analyze and interpret the data from an assessment, and present that data for diverse audiences.

Textbook & reading

This book is available in the Student Stores and on reserve in the SILS library, as well as from the online bookseller of your choice.

All readings will be assigned on the course Schedule. Readings not from Matthews will be available on the free web, as an ejournal, or via the Library's ereserves. Readings are also listed in my course delicious feed.

Additional reading

Other good books on evaluation generally and evaluation in libraries specifically include:

Also the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) sponsors a biannual Library Assessment Conference. Conveniently, this conference will be taking place right in the middle of this semester, on 25–27 October 2010, in Baltimore. You should go.